Reddit transparency report, 2014
reddit.com
reddit.com
Is this the warrant canary? Has this been around before?
I would imagine not, considering this is their first transparency report.
Moxie saying "Every lawyer we've spoken to has confirmed that [having a warrant canary] would not work." Which isn't surprising. When the government tells you not to communicate something, you aren't allowed to communicate it. Not not not not communicating it isn't some clever loophole.
I'd take the EFF's word over WhisperSystems'.
While the EFF is . . . well, they don't promise to bail you out of jail and pay all your court costs and go to jail for you. The EFF is an advocacy organization, begging people to believe in magic beans, by telling everyone that magic beans work. If one of them does and finds out it doesn't work, what is the EFF going to do then? Say "I'm sorry" really nicely?
The hired lawyers' viewpoint is easy to see. If the government orders you not to communicate something, then you aren't supposed to communicate that information. Doing it in a really roundabout way is still communicating it.
* They don't communicate anything to users
* Users understand a gag-order was issued
* They didn't break any laws
Right there? Communication happened.
All these attempts to say "well, I'm not really communicating" are just flopping on the beach. You have information, and because of your action, a third-party now has that information. We'd call that communication any day of the week.
Or, in signal processing terms:
______________
|______________
information---^That is probably what WhisperSystem's attorneys have advised them.
It would be a tough case to make that switching to an explicitly government-permitted method of disclosure was a violation of an order.
It's true that reddit could change to that new format. However, if they are using the change to that new format to communicate information, then they are sunk.
This is the real conundrum:
1. if It Is Known that this is how reddit will communicate an NSL, then it's clearly communication
2. if it's not known, then this isn't a good way for reddit to tell its users that they got an NSL.
In the eyes of a court, either it's reasonable to infer that a disclosure notice compliant with the Dep. A.G. letter is a sign of having received a NSL, or it isn't. If it isn't, then the court can have no objection to such a notice. If it is reasonable to make that inference, then the Dep A.G. letter amounts to a formal authorization from USG to issue a document permitting that inference.
In the eyes of the internet at large, a 0-249 notice never actually means 0 – by the Gricean maxim of quantity, if a range is given then it can be assumed that it was necessary that a range be given.
This is the problem: if you set up a codebook of "perfectly legal things to say," it doesn't mean you escape gag order by using that codebook to talk about things in the gag order.
Here's a hypothetical (which someone has probably already suggested):
Say the reddit admin who puts this report together always includes a number from 0-999 at the very end of the report. To that admin, it's a signal of a gag order having been imposed. Maybe when it's an odd number, or when it's prime, or when the middle digit is the sum of the two outer digits, or the number is greater than 900.
If only that admin knows the system, everything is okay. But it's also useless as to what a warrant canary is used for: telling users you've been subject to a gag order.
So the admin tells people that it's intended as a canary and the method to decode. It's pretty obvious this is communicating exactly the information that you've been forbidden to communicate.
So if the Internet community decides that "we have received no NSL letters" means no NSL letters and "we have received 0-249 NSL letters" means there has been an NSL letter, than changing your message to comply with that understanding is an obvious communication.
> What should an ISP do if the warrant canary is triggered?
> If an ISP with a warrant canary receives gagged legal process, it should obtain legal counsel and go to a court for a determination that it cannot be required to publish false information. While some ISPs may be tempted to engage in civil disobedience, EFF believes that it is better to present the issue to a court, to help establish a precedent. If you run an ISP with a warrant canary and receive gagged legal process, contact info@eff.org if you would like help finding counsel.
How is this understandable? The US constitution prohibits it.
Eg there is a public mailbox folder that can be checked by anyone online and there is an email filter that directs all mail with keywords typically found in requests to that folder. When a request is received you would of course be forced to block access to the mailbox as soon as you were aware of the takedown, but losing the ability to check that the mailbox is clean is the warrant canary. There would always be a small window between when the email arrived and was visible and when the company saw the request and blocked access.
1. You receive warrant you aren't allowed to tell friend about.
2. ???
3. Friend now knows you got a warrant! How clever!
Courts have dealt with this nonsense for a long time. It's called "distinction without a difference."
It's only one sentence, and very blunt:
>Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press...
And I think they have at least one lawyer.
I could put a warrant canary on my website, and then remove it. What does that prove?
Take Apple. It had something that was assumed to be a warranty canary. It's no longer there. People made assumptions. Has Apple done anything wrong?
Because courts aren't that dumb. Blackmail is illegal, too, and frequently the person demanding blackmail doesn't explicitly say "give me money or I publish this evidence." (It's legal to publish information, and it's legal to get paid not to publish it, but it's illegal to demand money not to publish it.)
I don't know what happened with Apple.
The only ways around this is for the information that a warrant was received to be sent before it is received (to give an example that doesn't violate causality, a person stream 100% of everything they see/hear, so that between the time of receiving such a warrant and realizing what the warrant actually is the information that it has been received was already sent out). And even then I see the courts ruling against them because the courts will argue the spirit of the law was violated.
Along with traditional explicit advertising models, internet marketing usually involves more subtle techniques such as seamless paid content interleaved with user content, as you see on Facebook and elsewhere. Subtle and invisible marketing is especially important on Reddit, as forum users are not tolerant of paid content, as evidenced by the collapse of Digg, so the operators of Reddit have to keep up the impression of Reddit being pristine and untouched by marketers.
But Reddit has to make revenue, as they are a business and not a charity. Reddit employees are mods of many of the default subreddits, and often post content to those boards that bubbles to the top of the front page. The evidence trail is direct, as you can directly view an employee's posts on their profile page. It would be absurd for Reddit to not use modern internet marketing techniques to generate revenue.
Not only does Reddit support marketing through posts, but they also control the narrative of Reddit. Just live television before it, advertisers are very sensitive to the content carried on the medium that their advertisements are part of, and use their dollars to influence what can and can't be said in that channel. The same goes for Reddit.
Can you address the specific claim made by baseten, namely that there are subreddits (whether default or non-default) that are managed for pay by other organizations?
I'll note that I don't visit Reddit unless linked to a specific conversation, so I don't have a proverbial horse in the race. I just have my curiosity piqued when a chain of rebuttals gets so far off base from the original claim.
As I explained in other comments below, I have extensive experience moderating large subreddits and in my time, have not seen a single shred of evidence which shows anyone is "paying to play". If something like that was occurring, it would inevitably be discovered and become viral news everywhere, just like how it was on Digg. I'm sure the administrators of the site keep an eye on the actions, messages and PMs of the top mods so there are more checks and balances on that kind of behavior. More than most people realize.
http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/2tzvhv/so_i_got_a_glim...
posted by Ryan Merket, Product Manager at Reddit, as a push for Samsung products:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanmerket
He subtly admitted in other posts that Reddit is looking to make money from posts such as this...
http://www.reddit.com/r/HailCorporate/comments/2u0czi/samsun...
Read this sentence of his:
"I think you summed it up pretty well in your last two sentences."
Referring to:
"But since Reddit users will run if they detect Reddit turning into Digg, Reddit has to be a lot more subtle about how they let marketing occur."
Of course corporations are going to post to reddit. Anyone who thinks that is nefarious in of itself is deluding themselves. If those people were trying to game the system in some way, to subvert the organic process, that's another matter entirely. Yet, there is absolutely zero evidence of that. Frankly, your dot connecting is like that of a paranoid child. It sounds like something from /r/Conspiracy.
As someone who is a mod of one or more default subreddits, I promise you, this is certainly not the case.
I can't "prove" it, but I work with these people every single day and have for years. I'm intimately familiar with the "power mods". We even have our own semi-private subreddit, /r/DefaultMods, where we actually talk about things like this. We discuss how the conspiracy wackos will accuse us of being reptilian shills for Pepsi today, then tomorrow turn around and accuse us of being shills for Coke. Next week we're shills for the U.S government, the week after we're shills for the KGB or the PRC. This is not an exaggeration. I personally have been accused of being all of those things on numerous occasions over the years. Truth is, I'm just a welder here in Chicago. Let me tell you how fun it is coming home from a long day at work only to be called a government shill by some teenage neckbeard who thinks aliens did 9/11.
At some point, you just get tired of it, ignore it, and you have to laugh at the situation. It's why some mods make fun/light about the whole thing. If you start taking it seriously, you're going to go crazy. Modding a large subreddit is a lot like babysitting, except you're not babysitting infants, you're babysitting high school kids.
The only real evidence that "mods are shills" is a minimal and extremely exaggerated. Years ago there was a mod who was busted for spamming links to their own stuff. SEO type spam. I think his name was SolInvictus. The admins caught him and shadowbanned his account immediately. There's also examples of other mods catching and busting mods for spamming (like the quickmeme guy). These things don't go left unchecked. If you think the admins aren't paying attention and catching/busting mods, then you'd be naive. They are, and have been. If there was someone working to systematically undermine their subreddit, the evidence to the admins and even to the other mods would be overwhelming and obvious.
By the way, /r/Undelete is populated and run by people from /r/Conspiracy. Overwhelmingly so. Mods will show up to explain why a submission was removed (which rule it broke and why) and the conspiracy crowd will blatantly ignore it and downvote the helpful mod. That place was nice in the very beginning, now it's as toxic as any stormfront forum. No exaggeration. You'll actually probably find more level headed people in a stormfront forum.
I don't know why people conflate the two when they're not remotely the same.
As far as wikipedia goes, that's an entirely different ball game. There's significantly less oversight. On reddit, the admins and other mods are always watching. They will see the PMs and requests and watch how those mods respond to them. If one of my co-mods started acting strangely and approving or removing things they shouldn't be, me and the other mods will call them out on it. It would be made public if we couldn't just immediately dismiss them. That happens all the time already, but it's not related to "shill" stuff. It's usually just internal mod struggles and policy disputes.
People, for whatever reason, imagine that all the mods know each other and are friends in real life. That everyone is close-knit. Nope, quite the opposite. A lot of the backroom politicking goes on is between mods within the same subreddit. You can bet your ass if someone was "bought and paid for", they would be outed by their co-mods, especially in a large subreddit with lots of mods (lots of mods = more eyes). They would do this if only because it allows them to gain more power themselves. Again, it's all about the checks and balances that are inherent to reddit's system. Those same checks and balances are absent from wikipedia's editing system. Most actions are quite public (it's easy to see when a front page post disappears) and it's also visible to the users themselves. Changes and edits on wikipedia aren't as visible and its editors aren't listed in the sidebar of every wikipedia page.
/r/technology?
Did everyone just forget?
Plenty of subreddits do the exact same thing. Some use automod to remove racist slurs, memes, and others use automod to remove all political terms because they have a "No Politics" rule. It doesn't mean the mods are shills.
And now that the terms were restored, take a look at the subreddit. It's absolute crap now. Quite literally. It's supposed to be about technology but it's now /r/Politics2, with every other submission about Comcast, Tesla, and the FCC. Seriously, go look right now. there are 10 submissions about the FCC, 5 about Comcast and a couple about Tesla right now on their front page. This isn't just a one time thing, it's been like that every day since.
What happened to actual technology?
[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/2u3sqp/reddits_first_t...
It's a tool for disseminating information and talking points.